Nigeria blasphemy row: Auschwitz memorial head volunteers to serve sentence

The director of the Auschwitz Memorial appealed to Nigeria’s president on Friday to pardon a 13-year-old boy who was sentenced to 120 months of jail on blasphemy prices, even volunteering to serve a part of the boy’s sentence.

Piotr Cywinski wrote to Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari in regards to the case of Omar Farouq, who was just lately convicted in a Sharia court docket in Kano State in northwest Nigeria after he was accused of utilizing blasphemy in an argument with a buddy.

Cywinski mentioned that because the director of the location that preserves the stays of the German Nazi extermination camp, “where children were imprisoned and murdered, I cannot remain indifferent to this disgraceful sentence for humanity.”

Cywinski mentioned that if the president couldn’t give clemency, he would means that 120 grownup volunteers from everywhere in the world — “myself personally among them” — every serve a month in a Nigerian jail.

“Regardless of what he said, he cannot be treated as fully aware and responsible, given his age,” Cywinski wrote. “He should not be subjected to the loss of the entirety of his youth, be deprived of opportunities, and stigmatized physically, emotionally, and educationally for the rest of his life.”

The Auschwitz memorial web site is situated in southern Poland, which throughout World War II was underneath German occupation. The German forces killed 1.1 million individuals there. Most of the victims had been Jewish, however others, together with ethnic Poles, Soviet POWs and Roma, additionally misplaced their lives in massive numbers there.